THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 41

  that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was

  shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an

  ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and

  sympathetic. When at last we got within sight of the House the

  square was a seething seat of excited people, and the array of

  police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a

  revolutionary outbreak. There were dense masses of people up

  Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that

  ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such

  stupendous preparations…

  3

  Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night,

  and all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the

  piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch,

  stood women pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we

  went to and fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course,

  the independent worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed

  old ladies standing there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-

  looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate bitterness

  of battered women showing in their eyes; north-country factory

  girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women; trim, comfortable mothers of

  families; valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,

  hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very

  dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, grave and steadfast,

  with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked

  defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of

  adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never

  ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or

  cease. I found that continual siege of the legislature

  extraordinarily impressive-infinitely more impressive than the

  feeble-forcible "ragging" of the more militant section. I thought

  of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the

  women from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to

  Westminster.

  I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should

  ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past

  with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards

  the end the House evoked an etiquette of salutation.

  4

  There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat

  the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,

  irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political

  life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it

  thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it

  insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to

  the essential things…"

  We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient

  children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That

  conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its

  essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder

  treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly

  as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent

  preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality

  he has so stupendously summoned-he bolts back to littleness. The

  world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he

  adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of

  tea…

  The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.

  It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And

  at any particular time only a small minority have a personal

  interest in changing the established state of affairs. Habit and

  interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious

  change and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules us. The great

  mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential

  people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their

  compromise. Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to

  be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for intense

  love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a

  cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as

  their compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled,

  dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest

  reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the

  Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal

  marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "Iam for leaving

  all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice,

  "Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!"

  That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed

  passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and

  went out.

  For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.

  I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music,

  for the human figure in art-turning my heart to landscape. I

  wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable

  until I found the effective sneer. In matters of private morals

  these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of

  these things any more for ever. I hated the people whose talk or

  practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe

  that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible,

  because I had decided to treat them as at that level. I was, in

  fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.

  And yet one cannot helpthinking! The sensible moralised man finds

  it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still

  dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,-the appeal of beauty

  suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer

  nights, the sweetness of distant music…

  It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the

  present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and

  so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to

  unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married

  for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling

  has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't

  understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children

  or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the

  supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other

  affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most

  fundamental aspect of existence…

  5

  It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of

  the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about

  all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was

  bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the

  last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid

  discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences,

  no doubt,
have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful

  emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of

  things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment

  of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now

  that Iam exiled from the political world, it is possible to

  estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.

  I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a

  universal education grew to paramount importance in my political

  scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the

  quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again

  to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and

  the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had

  been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on

  the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit

  were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent

  scolding of prosperous childless people in general-one never

  addressed them in particular-nothing was done towards arresting

  those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I

  found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the

  conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,

  based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.

  It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and

  well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised

  state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its

  intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some

  very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old

  haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly

  discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or

  good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.

  Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a

  puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.

  No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present

  question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and

  sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional

  except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more

  doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and

  beautiful and courageous people must come together and have

  children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be

  freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to

  be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom

  need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances

  have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to

  whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the

  family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies

  in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant-

  and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead…

  The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it

  can get the best possible increase under the best possible

  conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent

  family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and

  owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,

  subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up

  or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable

  conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An

  enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put

  upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out

  to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to

  social and material considerations.

  The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition

  of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is

  changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy

  everything is changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls

  and falls most among just the most efficient and active and best

  adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from

  among its failures and from among less civilised aliens.

  Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their

  possible babies in the furnaces that run the machinery. In the

  United States the native Anglo-American strain has scarcely

  increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries

  the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic elements

  in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally

  and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural

  excuse for their dependence gone…

  The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory

  groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless

  effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a

  solitary child grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes

  that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a great

  social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married

  women, here careless, decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and

  asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly

  proliferation of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in

  houses.

  What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying

  boundaries, pushing research and discovery, building cities,

  improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging

  wars, while this aimless decadence remains the quality of the

  biological outlook?…

  It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion

  until I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had

  it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than

  participate in all the surrenders of mind and body that are implied

  in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage

  and the begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance

  in the life of the community. In a world in which everything

  changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas

  perpetually renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that

  we should not even examine into these matters, should rest content

  to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a barbaric age.

  Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the

  solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together,

  are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out

  from our IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to

  say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of

  individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must

  become less and less subordinated to individual men, since this

  works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and

  sterilisation of their essentially social function; they must become

  more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to

  the collective purpose. Or,
to express the thing by a familiar

  phrase, the highly organised, scientific state we desire must, if it

  is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible man-ruled

  family, but upon the matriarchal family, the citizen-ship and

  freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.

  After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows

  clear to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and

  mothering is their special function in the State, and that a

  personal subordination to an individual man with an unlimited power

  of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No

  contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to

  recognise any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her

  freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice

  and she means "family" while a man too often means only possession.

  This alters the spirit of the family relationships fundamentally.

  Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a

  pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel.

  Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood

  struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and tears…

  I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the

  matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I

  want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full

  participation in the collective purpose of mankind. Women, Iam

  convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are

  capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them

  citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily for them and for

  their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's

  satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good children

  in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service,

  choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way

  enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social

  consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched

  mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to

  change the respective values of the family group altogether, and

  make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner